2007-03-10

Institutionalized Rape

Ending dictatorship was something that I have wanted to do, ever since I was a child. I didn't care if the Russians wanted to be communist, so long as they could vote on it, and debate it. I've since changed my position and recognize that minorities have a right to a rational, humanist government, which overrides the "right" of the majority to sacrifice virgins to keep the sun rising, or gas Jews etc. So I was always looking for an opportunity to spread democracy. An Arab once told me that he could understand democracy in Australia, but not in Arab countries - that Arab countries required a strong leader. I thought that was nonsense - the Arabs can vote for a strong leader if that's what they want. Another nonsense thing he told me was that it was big business who determined who would win elections in Australia. I asked him who big business was currently making him vote for. He said "Liberal or Labor - I'm not sure at the moment"!!! (Those are the right-wing and left-wing parties in Australia that always get elected).

Anyway, this idea that the Arabs can't handle democracy was something I also heard from other sources. I don't know where they were getting that idea from, since I didn't see any evidence of it actually being tested. But there was this general concept that the Arabs had a separate culture and we had no right to interfere in it. We must respect all cultures as equal. I still didn't see why that meant they couldn't have democracy. Why can't their culture democratically elect someone that represents their culture? What other method is there to actually ascertain what their culture is?

Finally an opportunity came up to spread democracy to an Arab country - Iraq - in 2003. And I found myself arguing with people who didn't believe we had a right to interfere with other "cultures". When Bush started talking about institutionalized rape, I thought that that would surely clinch the deal. Surely no-one in the world thought that rape was some sort of cultural quirk and that Iraqi women recognized that part of their culture was to be raped by their own government every now and then. But no, they were unpersuaded. I was completely stunned. I know with all the feminazi brainwashing that we're meant to believe that there are no differences between men and women, but I assumed that deep inside, men still had a basic instinct to protect women. Personally I have been an anti-feminazi ever since I was a child and found out that I was being held responsible for thousands of years of discrimination by other men against other women. But deep down I wanted to protect the weak, and women in particular. And I assumed that most men shared this same basic desire. It's not unusual. E.g. when the Titanic went down, women and children were evacuated first. This is part of our culture - protect women. And I never heard anyone say "except if the woman is foreign, or a different religion or race".

So something was going seriously wrong. For some reason these perfectly normal Australians had not even considered the fact that we would finally get a chance to liberate millions of people, and even stop Saddam from raping women. If you don't act to protect women from being raped, just what cruelty does Saddam need to do to goad you into action? You can argue that killing large numbers of men is part of a sort of civil war that Saddam was waging on those who opposed him. We've been desensitized to such killing. The commies did it too, all for the greater good of the state. It was all whitewashed by the left-wing in our own countries. But not even the commies used to rape women. No-one should have been desensitized for that. And it was a violation of the Geneva Conventions as well. Even if you think Saddam has a right to wage war against his enemies in Iraq, women should be left out of it.

So the rape of women is what I chose to concentrate on. Because if I couldn't get people to even agree that women have a right to not be raped, what chance have I of convincing them of anything else? And I thought this was a slam dunk. I didn't think it was possible to argue that Saddam had some sort of right to rape Iraqi women. And I was right. No-one has been able to come close to justifying this. People have tried various diversionary tactics. E.g. they ask me if I was a rapist and that's why I'm so obsessed with it. An ad hominem attack. My reply is that why WEREN'T they obsessed with this - were they rapists themselves so didn't see anything wrong with it? They don't reply to that.

Some have tried to argue that Bush and Bremer were lying about the rape rooms. That they've managed to say these things multiple times in public, and the entire hostile left-wing press in the entire world has for some reason chosen not to expose their lies. Reality is the press knows damn well it is true, and they don't want to dwell on it, because it undermines their worldview. It is probably for this reason that we haven't had any documentaries come out showing just how cruel Saddam was. We haven't had documentaries about the horrors of communism either, and exposing the left-wing's hand in that. I wonder why?

Anyway, there are some other reports of institutionalized rape, which you can find here, here and here. Like I said, I wish this was in a proper documentary.

You'd think all these feminazi groups who even whinge about non-existant crimes in the west regarding pay or medical treatment would be up in arms about Iraqi women being raped by Saddam. But no. It would appear that all those NGOs are simply fronts for the communists, trying to undermine our capitalist economies by hook or by crook.

So, what price should be paid to end institutionalized rape in Iraq? Is this the sort of thing that invokes the expression "to the last man"? Well, my own opinion is that I'd rather sacrifice 90% of my country than live in slavery (domestic or foreign) where my daughter can be legally raped by my own government. At the Alamo they sacrficed 100%. I'm not as hard-headed as them. Here is what a Sunni imam, Sheik Jamaleddin al-Kobeisi, preaching at al-Shawaf mosque in Baghdad's Yarmouk district had to say about rape:

"The proud among us believe that killing all of Iraq's men is easier to accept than violating the honor of one Iraqi woman,"

So that's 50% of Iraq for 1 woman. The Iraqis have not even had to pay 1% to get legal protection of their human rights, including the right to not be raped. So I assume that this Sunni imam is a very happy camper. Or he should be, anyway, by his own standards.

Actually there are worse crimes than rape. E.g. child molestation. But as far as I know, Saddam didn't do that, so I can't cite that. And I'd rather be raped than have my tongue chopped out, which is another thing that Saddam did, and should have been equal or greater incentive to go and liberate Iraq. You can see that in video here and here. Unless you want to claim that's all a CIA fake too. Even if you want to bury your head in the sand and say that because you didn't personally witness any Iraqis being killed or raped etc, it didn't happen (holocaust denial anyone?), you should AT LEAST have known that Saddam was a dictator who didn't allow multiple parties to compete in elections. THAT should have been justification enough! People have a right to not be subjugated if they haven't committed a crime!

But the saddest thing is that besides Bush and Bremer talking about the rape rooms, I've seen very few westerners actually use this in their arguments. When the Iraqi blogs started up, I watched the comments intensely, to see how the pro-war were arguing. None of them were saying that regardless of whether you think Saddam was a threat or not, you should have done it just to protect women from being raped. It's so bloody obvious. This isn't something new I invented. Protecting women is a very basic part of our culture, and our laws reflect that. I didn't make these laws up, they were already there. All I have attempted to do is extend that same legal protection of human rights across the globe.

Another dopey thing people keep on bringing up is that women in Australia get raped too, so why don't I deal with that instead of interfering in Iraq? Well, it IS being dealt with in Australia. It is ILLEGAL to rape women in Australia, and we have a police force to go and arrest rapists and jail them. That's the best technology anyone knows of. No-one knows how to stop individuals from breaking the law. All we can do is dissuade them from doing so under threat of punishment, and to punish them after the event. I don't know how people can be so stupid they can't distinguish between LEGAL and ILLEGAL.

Another attempt people have made is to claim that rape wasn't legal in Iraq either, and that Saddam was operating illegally when he was ordering women to be raped. Well, from what I read, there was actually a specific law that people were authorized to do anything they wanted if it was to protect Saddam's regime. But regardless, that's missing the point. When I talk about legal, I'm talking about the rules that the institutions (the security forces) are actually following. If you can't report a rape ordered by Saddam to your local police station and get Saddam arrested and jailed, then it means that rape is defacto legal, regardless of what is written down on paper. It's what the police are under instruction to enforce that matters. Another very obvious thing. And it's totally amazing how thick others can be. Bizarre in fact.

But this whole war is bizarre. It's basically a case of rape doesn't matter unless the media says it matters. That morality would suddenly change if we had the media and NGOs and universities and churches and marches all campaigning for Saddam's holocaust to be dealt with. How the entire western world has managed to turn its back on the most basic morality - morality which is actually entrenched in our laws already and is basically a reflection of their own supposed morality - is completely unfathomable. Why do we have these laws protecting women to the nth degree if you don't think protecting women is important? Make up your mind. Is it important or not??? Or is it important that Australian women are protected and completely unimportant if Iraqi women are protected? If this isn't schizophrenia, what is? How is it possible that the entire world is schizophrenic and doesn't respond to rational argument that is based on this very basic morality that is already entrenched in our laws and I've never even heard anyone dispute, and is not something that I made up myself?

UPDATE: Thanks to Jason at Iraqnow for the link. Jason is someone who personally put an end to these horrors. You cannot imagine how much I love these warriors who risk their own lives to protect complete strangers. There is really no-one better in this world. All these soldiers should be getting Nobel Freedom Prizes instead of giving prizes to terrorists like Mandela and Arafat. The state of the world currently is bizarre.

UPDATE 2: There is one person from the left who recognizes the complete moral bankruptcy of the left, and says (read the whole thing) "as long as we are to be ruled by capitalist states, which would you rather be ruled by: a coalition of liberal democracies that pay at least lipservice to free speech, or any number of ruthless genocidal dictatorships that want to revive the worst aspects of the Middle Ages".